In the previous post I mentioned a main word list for students wanting to comprehend English, the General Service List. A sister list to the GSL is the Academic Word List (AWL) which contains a further 570 words which are important to university students and aren’t contained in the GSL. At that Wiktionary link, the words are broken up into 10 sub-lists in order of importance, with links to a dictionary entry for the word with definition and pronunciation. AWL was previously called the University Word List (UWL) and contained some 800 words.

Wiktionary also has the set of 850 words in Ogden’s Basic English which was designed to spread English throughout the post-WWII world. The list is also available here.

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary also has the AWL online as well as an extended Oxford 3000 list with pronunciation and definition.

This website has some 3000 (actually 2126) common English words grouped by frequency so they can be learned in general order.

Another list of 1000 common words comes from the Brown Corpus from the 1960s and some of the words are dated.

In the past a number of such word frequency lists were published on paper, such as The American Heritage Word Frequency Book. Those books may still be useful for those who don’t like technology or carry a smartphone, but the online versions are also quite handy to keep bookmarked.